Dell Enriches Statistica Advanced Analytics Platform

Dell is partnering with Datawatch Corporation to continue growing its analytics business by integrating Datawatch’s interactive visualization and dashboarding capabilities directly into its Statistica advanced analytics platform.

“We’re very excited about it,” said John Thompson, general manager of advanced analytics at Dell. “There’s been a fair amount of market activity around making advanced analytics more self-service so people can go in and manipulate visualizations, graphs, and charts, interactive visualizations of data rather than looking at simple tabular forms of data.”

This partnership will enrich Dell’s Statistica platform to stream data into interactive visual representations in order to better facilitate the sharing of information and discovery of hidden patterns. “It’s taken us a couple months to integrate the two products together,” Johnson said. “We are taking the Datawatch product and augmenting the existing visualizations that we had in Statistica with the new interactive visualizations and it also enables us to do a few other things.”

Statistica delivers a full range of advanced and predictive analytics tools that help organizations predict future trends to identify new customers and sales opportunities, forecast industry shifts, explore “what-if” scenarios, and reduce the occurrence of fraud and other business risks. “In our world advanced analytics is not so much what has happened in the past, but predicting what’s going to happen in the future,” Thompson said.

The partnership came about after Dell examined the visualization market to decide if it should develop something new to satisfy this audience or partner with someone who already had a market leading product, according to Thompson. “The technology lined up really well,” Thompson said. “We decided to do a relationship and integrate our [products] together.”

In addition to this partnership, Dell has improved Statistica by richer development of the solution’s big data analytics module, formerly known as Kitenga, allowing it to integrate with Hadoop, Toad and Boomi. These integrations give Statistica a comprehensive data connectivity layer, enabling users to connect to more than 164 data sources both on premise and in the cloud without the need for constant IT support. “Over the next couple of releases Kitenga will become the big data feature of Statistica,” Thompson said.

Business analysts and eventually business users will benefit from the partnership between Dell and Datawatch, according to Thompson. Previously, Statistica has been popular with and targeted programmers, Ph.D.s and statisticians, Thompson said. “With this kind of highly visual interactive interface, we are starting to move that out to business analysts and eventually move it out to business users but, anybody in an organization who wants to interact with and manipulate data [will benefit],” Thompson said.